An experimental study of truth-telling in a sender–receiver game

Sánchez‐Pagés, Santiago; Vorsatz, Marc

doi:10.1016/j.geb.2006.10.014

Cited by 196 publications

(115 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Sutter's (2007) main concern is whether people who tell the truth in fact intend to deceive their partner; he does not run the control dictator games as Gneezy did and we do, and hence cannot speak to people's preferences over final outcomes. Sánchez-Pagés and Vorsatz (2007) suggest that truth-telling preferences can explain the behavior they find in a sender-receiver game. While our focus here is on the interaction of lying aversion and social preferences of the sender, they study the receiver's preferences to punish the sender for lying, and how this affects lying behavior.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 98%

Would I lie to you? On social preferences and lying aversion

2008

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This paper reinterprets the evidence on lying or deception presented in Gneezy (2005, American Economic Review ). We show that Gneezy's data are consistent with the simple hypothesis that people are one of two kinds: either a person will never lie, or a person will lie whenever she prefers the outcome obtained by lying over the outcome obtained by telling the truth. This implies that so long as lying induces a preferred outcome over truth-telling, a person's decision of whether to lie may be completely insensitive to other changes in the induced outcomes, such as exactly how much she monetarily gains relative to how much she hurts an anonymous partner. We run new but broadly similar experiments to those of Gneezy in order to test this hypothesis. While we also confirm that there is an aversion to lying in our subject population, our data cannot reject the simple hypothesis described above either.Keywords: experimental economics, lying, deception, social preferences J.E.L. Classification: C91 * We thank Vince Crawford for encouragement and advice; Nageeb Ali, Jordi Brandts, Gary Charness, Arnaud Costinot, Nir Jaimovich, Ivana Komunjer, Albert Satorra, and Roberto Weber for comments and discussions; various seminar and conference audiences for feedback; and Tim Cason (the Editor) and two anonymous referees for very useful suggestions. We also thank Uri Gneezy for generously clarifying unpublished details about his experiments, and for bringing the work of Matthias Sutter to our attention.

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Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 98%

Would I lie to you? On social preferences and lying aversion

2008

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“…See also Boles et al (2000), Crawford (2003), Brandts and Charness (2003), Croson et al (2003), Ellingsen and Johnnesson (2004), Cai and Wang (2006), Charness and Dufwenberg (2006), Sánchez-Pagés and Vorsatz (2007), Mazar and Ariely (2006), Mazar et al (2008), Dreber and Johannesson (2008), Sutter (2009), Lundquist et al (2009), Ellingsen et al (2009), Gino and Pierce (2009), Gino and Ayal (2011), and Gintis (2012). For a discussion of the social psychology literature on lies, see DePaulo et al (1996).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

White Lies

2012

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I n this paper we distinguish between two types of white lies: those that help others at the expense of the person telling the lie, which we term altruistic white lies, and those that help both others and the liar, which we term Pareto white lies. We find that a large fraction of participants are reluctant to tell even a Pareto white lie, demonstrating a pure lie aversion independent of any social preferences for outcomes. In contrast, a nonnegligible fraction of participants are willing to tell an altruistic white lie that hurts them a bit but significantly helps others. Comparing white lies to those where lying increases the liar's payoff at the expense of another reveals important insights into the interaction of incentives, lying aversion, and preferences for payoff distributions. Finally, in line with previous findings, women are less likely to lie when it is costly to the other side. Interestingly though, we find that women are more likely to tell an altruistic lie.

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“…For example, Shalvi et al (2011) andFischbacher &Föllmi-Heusi (2013) find that subjects do not always lie to gain money, even when their doing so cannot be detected. Significantly less than "full" lying is also found in sender-receiver contexts (Gneezy, 2005;Hurkens & Kartik, 2009), bargaining games (Lundquist et al, 2009, and hold-up games (Ellingsen & Johannesson, 2004), with some studies finding evidence of lying aversion per se (Sánchez-Pagés & Vorsatz, 2007).…”

Section: Related Literature and Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Promises and Endogenous Reneging Costs

Heller

Sturrock

2017

SSRN Journal

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We present a novel theoretical mechanism that explains the capacity for non-enforceable communication about future actions to improve efficiency. We explore a two-player partnership game where, before choosing a level of effort to exert on a joint project, each player makes a cheap talk promise to their partner about their own future effort. We allow agents to incur a psychological cost of reneging on their promises. We demonstrate a strong tendency for evolutionary processes to select agents who incur intermediate costs of reneging, and show that these intermediate costs induce second-best optimal outcomes.

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An experimental study of truth-telling in a sender–receiver game

Cited by 196 publications

References 22 publications

Would I lie to you? On social preferences and lying aversion

Would I lie to you? On social preferences and lying aversion

White Lies

Promises and Endogenous Reneging Costs

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